I’ve bought a few things from the flea market that I really want to show off (and justify the purchase of). It’s like when you want that new $250 cocktail dress so you say to yourself, ‘Well, we do have Jimmy’s 12th birthday party coming up, and it is at a restaurant and meals at that restaurant are like $18 an entree and I saw on Instagram that my crush, Jeremy, was there last week so what if he is there again? What if I’m wearing the same dress I wore when I ran into him a month ago? I obviously need this dress to make this occasion’. It’s like that.

So I figured we could do a ‘One credenza, four ways’ series to show you how you can really mix many styles together (with a consistent color palette) and demonstrate how your art and accessories can really change the context of a piece of furniture.

We borrowed the credenza from a vintage store in LA, Shopclass,and I believe it’s still for sale ($1800). It’s VERY pretty.

This first credenza/lady is kinda fancy and loves some glam and formality but is cool enough.

This lady, oh this lady, is like a cool rich liberal east coast lady. She’s probably a socialite and makes a mean Pimm’s cup and is friends with Joan Didion and Mick Jagger. This look works because of a few different reasons:

1. The shape of the accessories on the credenza creates a landscape effect and helps the eye move up and down as it moves across.

2. The color palette is simple but consistent – pinks and cool pastels in the paintings, gray in the chair, lamp and vase, whites to give your eye a break while the gold brings the bling.

3. The visual weight of the objects varys, keeping your eye moving and happy. If all the pieces were heavy (like the vase) or all were light (like the telescope) it would feel overdone or too off balance.

4. There is a decent mix of squared off and sculptural shapes – the art is square, the lamp is sculptural, the books are square, the flowers and the telescope is sculptural, the frame is square and the tray is oval.

4. There is a good mix of horizontal and vertical – the lamp, bust and the flowers are all helping to give the scape some height, then the books and tray keep it all grounded.

I found those two paintings at the flea market. I had been eyeing this guy’s work for months but didn’t have a reason to pull the trigger. They are plein airs but in crazy pastel and saturated colors. I have a thing for plein airs and plan on collecting a ton for our future country home – a huge wall of them.

That lamp is crazy and makes me want to move into a brownstone on east 53rd and 1st ave. To celebrate my move I made a gif of the styling process.

Photography by Tessa Neustadt, styling/art direction by me. Thanks to Shopclass for letting us borrow the credenza and that insane bird lamp.

Come back later in the week for the other 3 looks and vote for your favorite.

Much like my love for Fresca, Vietnamese food, marathon-ing tv shows (strangely into The Arrow and The Affair right now) and thrifting, my love for mixing all styles together never wanes. Sure, there are times when one style get more attention, or a new style captures my eye, but ultimately as long as its good, I don’t care what style it is. Of course mixing them together does get tricky at times (which is one of the biggest chapters in my upcoming book), but it can be done.

The Target videos are back! Like the rest of the world we took a break during the holidays but now its time to go into the bedroom and style it out – just like we are doing below. This video is all about bed styling and mixing textiles, but I know that there are also a lot of pretty darn wonderful Target pieces in there for the rest of the room, too, and all the resources are near the end.

When we started this room it was completely white – a totally blank space. It was our goal to make it look layered and interesting, full of vintage and Target, with lots of textures, pops of color and personality.

That blue stripe rug is ridiculously cute, and yes, layering it is never a bad idea. That macrame wall hanging is Target and if you are interested in it I’d suggest you just buy it right now. It’s the ‘brass ball lamp’ of this season, meaning that its going to sell out very fast and then make a lot of people sad. It’s totally impressive. And that pouf is part of Nate’s collection which should be out any day. Salmon is big this season as you all know, so we brought it into the space isn the most non-90’s way possible and I think it worked.

There are bedrooms and then there are MASTER bedrooms. This is one of those. Maybe its the size, the amount of windows/light or maybe its the beauty of each antique piece – I don’t know. Maybe its the fact that once it’s obsessively styled and beautifully shot it is forever clean and just so perfect in my mind. I’m sure they don’t style the bed each morning and they probably have clothes laying on the bench at times, etc, but in my mind this bedroom always just feels like a pretty boutique hotel room in the South of France. And I want to go to there.

Shana, my client, has great taste and already had some pretty amazing pieces to work with. We just helped with the execution and pulled it all together (check out their living room and guest room)

When we met this room it looked like this:

Could be worse, obviously, but it was just big, blue and intense like 1997 prom dress, with less cleavage. We didn’t have to do anything structural to it – it needed to be painted, the floors need to be refinished and that was pretty much it.

We painted the walls ‘Swiss Coffee’ (a pretty warm white, that goes beige if you aren’t careful), and we painted the window frames that dark gray called ‘Deep Space’ (by Benjamin Moore). You might be surprised that I did that because generally I’m more of a fan of white frames and often painting window frames just creates big squares in the room. but these frames and mullions were wood and metal, and there were other dark wrought iron accents in the house (namely the living room and the upcoming dining nook) that simply wanted to be dark gray. I actually love how it broke up the space, accentuated the architecture and added drama.

We started decorating, by bringing in the pieces that she already had and supplementing with some new pieces. She makes me look VERY good because in this room in particular she had a lot of these pieces already. The bed is from Restoration hardware, and it is big and soft and jut so incredibly inviting, and the rug is a huge sisal that honestly I don’t remember where we purchased (maybe she already had it?). But everything else here is vintage or antique. So we started playing and playing.

Ready for a really sunny, bright new master bedroom? I rarely gush about my own work, but we just shot this last friday and going back into that room gave me a such a rush of calmness and pride. It’s just so big, warm, high-end and yet totally comfortable and laid back. It’s not the current style in my house but man, there is a huge part of me that wants to buy an old Hollywood Spanish-style house and get my old world on. Next house. Next house.

Today we are mixing a bunch of pillows (and patterns) and then you are going to vote for your favorite pillow combo (using our fancy voting poll widget at the bottom). The winning pillow combination will win a helicopter ride to Aruba, and then a chance at one-on-one hot tub date with Prince Farming. They are so excited and have been tanning and highlighting their hair for WEEKS, so please be sure to weigh each combo properly and vote with your heart.

Here’s how it went down: when I was MANIACALLY organizing and cleaning our house over the break I realized that I had approximately 47 decorative pillows, just hanging out in closets, on furniture, etc. That doesn’t even include what is at the studio. So, before I took them all over to the studio (some to keep for future projects, some for our EPIC garage sale that is coming soon) I figured I’d shoot a little pillow post.

We started with two solid 24″x24″ white linen pillows on both sides and just changed out all the smaller pillows. We didn’t have any big solid pillows to help anchor the corners (which is what you need on a bench like this) – but for most sofas you are fine with 20″x20″ or 16″x16″ even, as long as the other pillows vary in sizes.

Lets get into it:

This first one is the ‘Grey Gardens meets Steven Alan, with a side of subtle’. Hilariously enough, this might be the most masculine. And by masculine I mean, like Adam Levine, totally muscular but he would rock a floral shirt. And women across America would faint.